175 A. Reading: Election Campaigns
Learning Objectives
After reading this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- How are American election campaigns organized?
- How are campaigns funded? What are the regulations that guide campaign fundraising and spending?
- What strategies do candidates use when pursuing elected office?
This section covers campaign organization, funding, and strategy. Getting elected often requires defeating opponents from the same political party in a primary election in order to become that party’s nominee. One party’s nominee must defeat the candidates from other parties in the general election. Election campaigns require organization, funding, and strategy. Legal guidelines, especially for campaign finance, influence the environment within which elections take place.
Campaign Organization
It takes the coordinated effort of a staff to run a successful campaign for office. The staff is headed by the campaign manager who oversees personnel, allocates expenditures, and develops strategy. The political director deals with other politicians, interest groups, and organizations supporting the candidate. The finance director helps the candidate raise funds directly and through a finance committee. The research director is responsible for information supporting the candidate’s position on issues and for research on the opponents’ statements, voting record, and behavior, including any vulnerabilities that can be attacked.
The press secretary promotes the candidate to the news media and at the same time works to deflect negative publicity. This entails briefing journalists, issuing press releases, responding to reporters’ questions and requests, and meeting informally with journalists. As online media have proliferated, the campaign press secretary’s job has become more complicated, as it entails managing the information that is disseminated on news websites, such as blogs like the Huffington Post, and social media, such as Facebook. Campaigns also have consultants responsible for media strategy, specialists on political advertising, and speech writers.
Pollsters are essential because campaigning without polls is like “flying without the benefit of radar.”[1] Polls conducted by campaigns, not to be confused with the media’s polls, can identify the types of people who support or oppose the candidate and those who are undecided. They can reveal what people know and feel about the candidates, the issues that concern them, and the most effective appeals to win their votes. Tracking polls measure shifts in public opinion, sometimes daily, in response to news stories and events. They test the effectiveness of the campaign’s messages, including candidates’ advertisements.
Relatedly, focus groups bring together a few people representative of the general public or of particular groups, such as undecided voters, to find out their reactions to such things as the candidate’s stump speech delivered at campaign rallies, de